Robert Worth, a longtime NYT journalist and bureau chief in the Middle East, was at Tahrir on that day when Egyptians rediscovered their country and their fellow citizens. There is a vivid and thrilling, almost dreamy, chapter on those eighteen days in Tahrir, where shared experiences had forged friendships and understanding between people of disparate backgrounds and ideologies, people who would otherwise have never met. However, Worth says, the protesters had no agreement on what their slogans stood for and therefore no agreement—in fact, no concrete ideas at all—on how to construct a just government and society.
In a theme that repeats elsewhere, Mubarak had played up the spectre of Islamism to suppress democracy in Egypt. After he fell, the Islamist movement-party Muslim Brotherhood chose not to protest the military rule, even though the military was their enemy. The Brotherhood, says Worth, wanted power, not democratic reform. They were successful in the elections but were frustrated in their designs by the old regime cronies who had remained in power, and the police state apparatus, even after Mubarak. This elite, aided by the army, ensured that the Brotherhood government couldn’t rule as intended. The Brotherhood moreover, had failed to carry along the liberals in Egypt, hastily trying to push through legislation to impose Islamic law and reneging on a promise not to run for the presidency. This fueled the protests after their candidate Mohamed Morsi of the Brotherhood became the president.
The unrest in Egypt had begun after a young man was beaten to death by police in Cairo. Now, it turns out that over the preceding decades of Mubarak’s rule, thousands of Egyptians belonging to the banned Muslim Brotherhood were tortured in jails, or killed. It is startling that “liberals” in Egypt didn’t mind. It is only when someone from the middle class, one of their own, died that they woke up. It had to be someone who could get a tribute page on Facebook.
This hypocrisy of Egypt’s liberals becomes even more repulsive when the Brotherhood was forced out of power and over a thousand of its supporters massacred by the army in Rabaa. The details of the army operation are gruesome to read, and the liberals’ non-reaction sickening. Among the dead was the daughter of Mohamed Beltagy—the most prominent leader of the Brotherhood—a death that, strangely enough, Erdogan of Turkey took upon himself to mourn, weeping melodramatically on live television. What I would have liked to read is a view of the betrayal of the spirit of Tahrir by the liberals, just as much as its betrayal by the Brotherhood.
From Egypt, Worth travels to other places to follow the events as they unfold. He tags along with a caravan of rebels on their way to Libya, which, as he describes it, is a surreal country. Like many other Arab countries, it shouldn’t have been a country at all, with little unifying the numerous tribes that inhabit it. And “despot” is a weak word to describe Muammar Qaddafi, Libya’s ruler for over four decades, a man who tried to impose his own vocabulary on Libyans—he was mad.
It appears that Libyans were quick to take up arms against Qaddafi once they saw what was happening elsewhere. (But where did they get the weapons from?) Ultimately, French intervention secured victory for the rebels who soon turned to fighting each other. And such was the nature of the strange autocracy of Qaddafi, with its secret regime enclaves, that Libyans, says Worth, saw their country properly for the first time only after Qaddafi fell.
The surreality of Libya did not end after Qaddafi’s gruesome public lynching, captured, as much else during the Arab Spring and its aftermath, on cell phone cameras. Worth describes how he found the rebels chatting companionably, often jokingly, with their former prison guards about how they were tortured, and then proceeded to give them the same treatment, as if they were in a drama merely enacting their roles. It appears to be a country cursed by its oil wealth where, most than most others, there is no social cost to violence, aided by easy access to arms.
In Libya, the man whose story Worth follows in some detail is a rebel named Nasser Salhoba whose brother, a doctor, was killed by regime thugs for no reason just before they were routed. Salhoba and his fellow rebels scrupulously assemble all the evidence required to prosecute the former regime fighters now in captivity once they are handed over to a legitimate government. They do hand over them over to a transitional government but the rebels break free, rendering their painstaking work futile.
By far the most powerful story in the book is that of the two young women in Syria whose intimate friendship is torn apart by the civil war. One can feel, page by page, how the power shift between the majority Sunnis and the reigning Alawis poisons their minds and turns them into enemies. (One surprising fact I learned was that the Alawis, originally non-Muslims, declared and refashioned themselves as Shias in order to save themselves, after the French left, from the Sunni majority who thought of them as infidels.) What is remarkable is the way the two former friends begin digging up innocuous things from their past and reinterpreting them in light of their frayed relationship, and seeing maliciousness where there wasn’t any.
Worth describes with deftness how everyone believed their own facts, and the role of the media in constructing parallel, alternate narratives—Al Jazeera on the one hand, and the regime media on the other. Media—or at least people on social media—at the time were keen on playing up the role of Facebook and Twitter in facilitating large gatherings of people. That may have been true, but what appears to have been far more important is Al Jazeera. Their non-stop coverage of protests, wherever they were happening, beamed live across the region and the rest of the world, was a factor whose importance I hadn’t realized.
In any case, Worth cites a confluence of factors that led to the Arab Spring—economic malaise, unemployment, a demographic change—with hindsight of course, as he acknowledges. In his view, it represented not the beginning of a new dawn but the final disintegration of the corrupt regimes that had ruled the region for over half a century.
From his chapters on Syria, what emerges very clearly is how Assad, like every other dictator in the region, constructed the bogey of terrorism as a shield to buy itself legitimacy in the eyes of the West. He even released jihadis from jail to discredit the rebels almost at the very beginning of the protests, a diabolical move. Over time, Syrian rebels have been replaced by foreign jihadis, culminating with ISIS. The spectre of terrorism has meant that the narrative became about ISIS, especially given its attacks in Europe, forgetting Assad’s crimes—precisely what he wanted.
Worth comes back to Syria in a later chapter, describing the rise of ISIS. He talks to two defectors from the group, whose stories are powerful, and traumatic. For one of them, the reality of the situation dawns when he is asked to accompany a convoy of trucks that dumps corpses of dozens of villagers, many shot in the head, including women and small children, into a gorge. Disillusioned by the mindless violence, this man goes back later to silently capture the scene on his cell phone, unable to come to grips with what had happened.
Violence of a different kind has been perpetrated for decades in Yemen, the poorest Arab country which, as Worth writes, has always been reduced to Osama bin Laden’s “ancestral homeland” in the press. He narrates the story of Saeed, an old man who has been rebelling against the regime for four decades and who is, initially, one of the recognized leaders of the uprising in Yemen. Again, like other Arab countries, Yemen has a past of coups and counter-coups, but Saeed kept the faith and believed he finally had the opportunity to help build the just and democratic state he wanted, a state he had a brief glimpse of during his time in Aden, the British-controlled capital of south Yemen.
After one of these failed revolutions in the past, Worth says that the president of north Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who came to power in opposition to the local sheikhs, co-opted those very sheikhs to remain in power, betraying the revolution. Saleh was a master at playing off his enemies against each other. He even created the principal opposition party in Yemen and filled them with his cronies. Worth describes how Saleh perverted the tribal system to his advantage, creating a new system where the elite appeared to be fighting each other but were really all benefiting from the same corrupt regime, reducing people to abject poverty.
The only somewhat hopeful story in the book is the last one, on Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began after a streetvendor set himself on fire, frustrated at how the authorities stifled what little freedom he had to scrape out a living. Whereas the uprisings in Egypt, Libya and Yemen were all leaderless, Tunisia had a leader in the form of Rached Ghannouchi of the Islamist party Ennahda. Here too, the Islamists come to power, provoking insecurity in the country. The elected government proceeds on the same path of mistakes that cost the Muslim Brotherhood power in Egypt before Ghannouchi decides to mend ways and seek a compromise. He makes a deal with an old regime figure, persuades his party to give up the power they had gained through an election, and does everything to install his competitor as the president. This, says Worth, has led to a fragile peace, for now.
For me, one of the key lessons from this book is how complicated the construct of “terror” is, and how Arab dictators have stoked the fear of terror as a kind of scarecrow, with more than an eye on the West, to hold on to power and justify their authoritarianism. In each of these countries, Islamist or jihadi takeover was a prophecy that the old regimes did everything to ensure was fulfilled—suppressing Islamism, treating people as less than human.
It’s not clear to me though, how “Islamism” is to be distinguished from hardline faith that is said to fuel jihad. Similarly, he talks about the Baathist parties in Iraq and Syria, without saying what links them and what “Baathism” is, nor does he say what “Arabism” means. I wish he had spent a page or two talking about the role of the erstwhile colonial powers in arbitrarily drawing up borders on the map with disregard, or perhaps malicious regard, for the ethnic, sectarian and religious fault lines of the Arab world. He does say in the introduction that this is a familiar trope that people fall back on, blaming history for everything wrong with the present. But to almost completely ignore the colonial legacy, as Worth does in this book, is misleading too. He doesn’t write much about the breakup of the Ottoman empire either.
And there are several other gaps in the book. I’m also mystified, more than ever, about the role of the Saudis. Why did they support the Egyptian army against the Muslim Brotherhood—even as Turkey did the opposite—and why did another Salafi party in Egypt side with the army? The Saudis propped up Saleh’s regime in Yemen for decades but then negotiated a regime change. (Riyadh is the automatic destination for fleeing dictators.) What’s interesting is that Saleh is a Shia, and he later took the help of the Houthis, the tribe to which he belongs and which he had fought for decades. The Houthis are supported by Iran and they’re now fighting Saudi-aided rebels. Worth also leaves unaddressed the puzzle of why Al Jazeera, and its patron Qatar, took on the role they did, and why they stand in opposition to the theocracies in their neighbourhood.
In each of these chapters, Worth comes through as a master of constructing a narrative out of reportage on unplanned events. To be able to write narratives of this quality, one must think about it even while reporting because it informs the kind of questions you ask—else the story risks becoming contrived. I stand in awe of the punishing, backbreaking reporting that has gone into this book. And that’s quite apart from the dangers of travelling and staying in conflict zones, and trying to talk to people who may or may not be your well-wishers. It requires some drive to keep going—that can only happen if the stories you’re pursuing mean something to you.
Worth can read people well, but I wonder—did they not ask him why he was so interested in their lives? How did he explain to them the nature and goals of narrative nonfiction? How did the people he write about trust him and why did they keep sharing their lives with him though they knew they would get nothing in return? Did Worth’s status as an American give them the feeling that he might, somehow, be able to help them? Did the fact that he was reporting for the NYT give them some hope that those in power reading their stories might be moved to do something? How did Worth himself deal with these aspects? And how much of his reporting was done through the fixers and translators he thanks at the end? Though most of his sources will never read the book, did he feel the need to be loyal to the people who had trusted him by trying to present them in a positive light? Did he have to self-censor? Did he feel the need to reach out to them during the writing for more details, or after the writing to let them know it was done?
It is troubling though, that one has to rely on reports (and books) published in Western outlets by westerners to understand what happens in much of the world. Why aren’t there Chinese and Indian journalists writing about the Middle East? Too dangerous? Why not report on Africa or Southeast Asia then? Where, for that matter, are Indian journalists in China and vice versa? (Granted that Indian journalists with such interests may have to write mostly for foreign publications to earn a decent living. And cushy postings in London, Washington or Brussels don’t count as foreign reporting in my book.) Is it because westerners are granted more access? Does their passport give them imprimatur or power because people think it might help their cause? The bibliography in this book is filled with works, both scholarly and journalistic, by mostly American authors.
One of the most poignant stories in this book is the brief one of a young Egyptian named Ahmed. Inspired by the spirit of Tahrir, Ahmed ran for elections as an independent but lost. Once the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood government led by Morsi was toppled by the army, Ahmed grew despondent, became depressed, and vanished. He resurfaced months later in a video in Syria, having joined ISIS. His story ends with his death as a suicide bomber in Iraq.
Worth writes with immense sadness of the lost dreams and the lost spirit of Tahrir, with its denouement standing in such contrast with how it began, with people inspired by Gandhian thought. And that, I suppose is the most a journalist can do—chronicle, tell stories and hope it makes a difference.
Originally published 15.10.2019